Business partner

A business partner is a commercial entity with which another commercial entity has some form of alliance. This relationship may be a contractual, exclusive bond in which both entities commit not to ally with third parties. Alternatively, it may be a very loose arrangement designed largely to impress customers and competitors with the size of the network the business partners belong to.

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A business partner or alliance can be crucial for businesses. However, businesses can not choose business partners in any way they want. In many instances, the potential partner might not be interested in forming a business relationship, also known as business mating. It is important that both sides of the agreement complement each other, but also that there are some common ground. For example, in management style, mindset, and also technology. If, for example, management style would be too different between the firms then a partnership could be problematic. Kask and Linton (2013) [1] investigate under what conditions business mating (formation) takes place for startup firms seeking business partners.

The meaning of the term is quite different from that implied in partnership, and it is because of the potential for confusion between the two that widespread use of 'business partner' has been discouraged at times in the past.

A Business Partner is becoming more common in HR departments as it represents the employees position, ideally seeing the HR issues from the employers and employees point of view. Small and medium business are often turning to external HR Business Partners to solve any HR disputes.

Two of the companies may be partners with a third member of the partnership, but highly aggressive towards each other. (Oracle and SAP compete against each other in the ERP market.)

One party may be partner to a second party when targeting one market, but competitive against that same company when targeting another market. (Microsoft may be happy to work with Sun when Sun is offering its servers, but far less happy when Sun is proposing OpenOffice.org, in contention with Microsoft Office.)

Business partner search or business matchmaking is the process/service of finding buyers/customers, distributors, licensees, and/or other business partners. This can be provided as a paid service by a commercial organization, or as a free service by the commercial section of a country's embassy/consulate or an association of businesses in a particular area.

Customarily commercial consideration of this service is a one time fee. Fee of this service depends on the business domain, the volume of business of both partners that will end up in a partnership relation as the end result of this service, etc.

In a specific example of a specific domain this fee is found between EUR 1800~2200 depending on the tasks required from the business matchmaker.